SPEAKING AS THE ROMANS DID
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A recording of Cicero making a speech or Virgil reciting his poetry would be a fine thing. The best we can do twenty centuries later is tentatively reconstruct the sound of Latin, letter by letter, syllable by syllable, from various bits and pieces of evidence. Much is disputed, much open to interpretation. But we have to live with this, for no one can begin to appreciate a literature – which was written for recital – without some idea of its sound. Our reconstruction may be a somewhat incomplete jigsaw puzzle, but so too is that of Elizabethan English, and that hasn’t stopped production of Shakespeare’s plays. We would be hard put to identify just one correct pronunciation in any case. Latin was the first language of the empire of Rome, which lasted for over half a millennium, and stretched from the Crimea to Spain, Edinburgh to Egypt. For centuries Latin was the language of the entire known world, much as English is today. And who can boast a correct pronunciation of English? You? Me? Abraham Lincoln? Nelson Mandela? Alfred the Great? The sound of individual letters is more or less firmly established. The evidence comes from ancient commentators who give detailed advice about certain sounds (a symptom of variance if not change); other clues come from transliteration into and out of other languages (e.g. Greek Kaisar for ‘Caesar’, and Oualerios for ‘Valerius’); also from puns and plays on words, rhymes and assonance; and from the sub-Latin, or ‘Romance’ languages, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, of which the more isolated and conservative dialects are especially interesting – the hard 'c' of centum, for instance, in Sardinian (kentu, a hundred). Stress and intonation are less secure. Latin stress was probably similar to our own, where the accent falls on the penultimate syllable, or if that syllable is weak, the one before it: Augústus, Cícero. Some hold the view that the initial syllable had the weight of accent, particularly in pre-classical Latin. This idea is prompted by the weakening of first syllables when they are compounded and made second syllable: facere, perficere; capere, recipere. Even after the classical period we see this stress in, for example, the Italian pellegrino (from Latin peregrinus), whose initial syllable was given enough weight for the word to arrive in English as ‘pilgrim’. But we should not take this first-syllable theory too far. Almost all the examples cited involve a compound with a prefix, which would naturally be stressed on first formation. Put the accent on the second syllable of a compound, and it will soon lose the prefix and revert to the simple form. Even pellegrino was once a compounded form, being ‘a person from across the field’: per-ager-inus. |